What is Fat32

It is the file system that is used by many of the older versions of Microsoft Windows, but just what is FAT32?

Introduced along with the OEM Service Release 2 for the Windows 95 edition (sometimes known as Windows 95B or OSR2), it is also the default file system for Windows 98 as well as Windows Me.

The FAT32 file system can be installed on Windows 2000 (Professional and Server only as Data Center and Advanced Server don’t support it), Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. However, despite it being able to run on many different operating systems, both Microsoft and UITS recommend that you should use NTFS instead of the FAT32 file system. 

It is a system of allocating disk files from Microsoft, using values of 32 bits instead of 16 bit values for FAT entries. The FAT32 file system enables partition sizes of anything up to 2 terabytes (TB).

Microsoft originally decided to implement FAT32 as a way of overcoming the limited volume size of FAT16, while at the same time allowing the memory-constrained DOS code to be able to handle the format. Therefore, FAT32 was implemented as a new generation FAT system, which used 32 bit number clusters. Currently, 28 bits are used.

What is FAT32 maximum cluster size? The above should in theory support a maximum of around 268,435,000 clusters, which allows for drive sizes of about 2 terabytes. Because of the limitations of Microsoft’s scandisk utility however, the FAT file system is not permitted to grow larger than 4,177,290 clusters, which limits the volume to 124.55 GB, apart from when scandisk is not required. Both Windows XP and Windows 2000 placed a limitation of the FAT32 partition sizes, making the maximum size that can be created 32GB. According to Microsoft, this is by design rather than accident, but they do not explain why, leaving much confusion. Both of those Windows versions are more than capable of reading/writing FAT32 partitions of a much larger size. When FAT32 was first introduced along with the Windows 95 operating system, the huge number of changes that were incorporated meant it was a major improvement at the time.

4 GB minus one byte, or 232-1 bytes is the maximum file size possible for a FAT32 volume. This has become the most annoying limit for the majority of users since 2005, because many editing and video capture applications can easily far exceed this limit, and so can the system’s file swap function.

It supports disk partitions up to a size of 2 terabytes. Meanwhile, FAT16 only supports partitions up to a size of 2GB.A much lower amount of disk space is wasted using FAT32 on large partitions, because the cluster size minimum remains at just 4KB for any partition under 8GB.No compression when using DriveSpace is allowed with FAT32.Older motherboards, disk management software and BIOS are not compatible with FAT32FAT32 is often slower when compared to FAT16, though this depends on the disk size.FAT file systems do not provide file security, fault tolerance, compression or crash recovery abilities available with NTFS.Leave this article on What is FAT32 and Return to the Homepage

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